National Affairs: Tightening the Bolts

With only a few weeks to go before he heads into retirement, Defense
Secretary Charles Erwin Wilson is wrestling with a tough and bristly
problem: keeping defense spending from skittering far ahead of the
Administration's $38 billion estimate for the current fiscal year.
Engine Charlie found at the year's opening (July 1) that, with the
increasing complexity of weapons pushing costs upward, money was
pouring out at the rate of $40 billion a year. He ordered cuts of
100,000 in military manpower and 53,000 in Defense Department civilian
employment. Last week Engine Charlie tightened the budgetary bolts
again. With President Eisenhower's...